Effective January 3, 2005, The Thomson Corporation assumed ownership of International Pharmaceutical Abstracts (IPA) from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP). IPA has become part of the scientific business unit within the Thomson Scientific and Healthcare market group.

IPA is used by practitioners and researchers in the life sciences, giving them fast alerting access to international literature in applied pharmacology, electronically and in print. Thomson has been actively involved in production of the IPA database since 2001, when ASHP licensed Thomson's powerful Pegasus system to accelerate IPA's indexing and abstracting process.

IPA is currently available through a series of vendors. In addition to continuing to support these channels, this acquisition will enable eventual integration of this applied pharmacology information into Thomson Pharma, the customizable information solution for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.